NYTimes reports terrorists in the USDA plotted to kill schoolchildren and fast food customers

Or, as the headline is written at the times, Company’s Record on Beef Treatment Questioned.

Read this damned article, would you?  Take the trimmings from CAFO raised animals, liquify them, separate their parts in a centrifuge, treat them with ammonia, flash freeze and compress it, mix it with other meat, and get the USDA lunch program people to exempt your product from testing & recalls.  Whoo hoo! 

BUT - all hail Custer & Zirnstein:

Carl S. Custer, a former U.S.D.A. microbiologist, said he and other scientists were concerned that the department had approved the treated beef for sale without obtaining independent validation of the potential safety risk. Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef "pink slime" in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”

BUT - 

School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef.“Several packers have unofficially raised concern regarding the use of the product since the perception of quality is inferior,” the 2002 memo said. “But will use product to obtain lower bid.”

Ugh.